Don't lose the kind of humor in the last line. Being liberal is so often like being in a race where the person who gets the most offended the fastest wins (unless you're a white male, in which case you're a whiner!) and thanks for ignoring those reactions.

And then you lost me.

Most teenagers probably don't know what HPV is in the first place, much less that is can cause cancer.

Even the threat of HIV/AIDS doesn't keep kids from having sex.

So why in the world would an HPV vaccine CAUSE them to have MORE sex? I can't really see any teen I know breathing a sign of relief outside the doctor's office: "Phew, now that I can't get HPV I can blow every guy on the football team, no worries!" Give me a break, conservatives.

I have to disagree wth you about not telling your kids what the drugs you plan to introduce into their bodies are for. From the time she was small, I told my daughter, in terms she could understand, what the medication she was receiving was for, be it a vaccination, an antibiotic, or an aspirin.

She is now 16, and I have told her about the HPV vaccine, what it is for, and what is known about it, and have given her the choice of whether or not to take it. She has decided that she would rather wait until more is known, and has no desire to be an experimental subject - and she is justifiably leery of anything made by Merck after Vioxx. I would not take the shit at gunpoint.

you don't have to tell them what it's for.

Nice stand-up quality material in Salon article form! The list of diseases/sins was a tour-de-force. Keep up the good work Mr. Maher.

Has it not ocurred to these "Xtians" that regardless of their daughter's best intentions of abstaining, they could be coerced into sex? It's an ugly thought, but we all know it happens all the time.

Maher had me laughing out loud, but he ruined it with his last line. Just because he is terrified of marriage, he doesn't have to imply it destroys all joy.

one of these days she'll have unprotected sex, perhaps even on her virginal and sacred wedding night, and she'll be sleeping with some fool who's already had sex and contracted hpv.

why don't we have vaccines for men?

and it bears repeating, over and over and over again until i get an answer: why do wingnuts hate women?

I am not sure what your statement has to do with Maher's points:

"We are the ones who have produce more presidents than any other state."

In any case, it is factually incorrect. Virginia, not Texas, is the birthplace of the most Presidents, at eight:

http://www.virginia.org/site/features.asp?FeatureID=74

I'm a cross between a liberal and a libertarian, in main.

My observation is this: most of the hard left is exactly the same as the hard right. The left would prohibit free speech that isn't pc, while the right would prohibit free speech that disagrees with its tenets. No difference. The hard leftwould have us all legally and morally bound to 'be healthy as possible', including making laws about the same, and the hard right would legally bind us to forego pre-marital sex, homosexuality, recreational drugs, etc. No difference. The left wants to protect people from themselves, just as the right does - neither would allow us true freedom or autonomy of judgement.

The left speaks just as hatefully and venomously as the right does....yet justufies itself as 'reacting' to the right's evil...and of course the right makes the same claim.

Frankly, I don't see a bit of difference between the two, nor would I want either to be in charge...it would be the same land of 'for your own good' meddling, either way. One meddles for your 'safety', the other for your 'morals' - and both are intolerable.

As to this vaccine, I am very suspicious of its safety. I had cervical near-cancer, my female relatives all died of various cancers. Yet, if I had a daughter of that age, I would be very cautious about this vaccine - the drug companies cannot be trusted, nor can the FDA. I would wait a few years to see if any patterns emerge of associated side effects before allowing a child to receive it. Nor do I find mandatory vaccination for this appropriate; the cancer benefit is a secondary effect, and we generally do not legally require public vaccinations for secondary maybes way down the road. Some of the same parents who would make this vaccine madatory are the same ones who allow their kids to watch tv all day, and eat foods that rot their bodies and bring on diseases. I'm sick of ALL the 'holier than thou's', no matter whether they originate from the left or the right.

I've only read the editor's choice letters, so maybe someone suggested this. The one thing that I don't see being proposed is vaccinating boys as well as girls. If you want to take a virus out of a population, it's necessary to immunize everyone. It oughta be obvious that if girls are getting it from sexual encounters, the boys they're encountering are already infected.

Am I missing something here?

silly,foolish,smug....utterly predicatable and......................scary

Bill Maher has his reasoning right on this one. I wrote an article for my campus paper making this exact same point, even using the same analogy regarding tetanus. It is available here http://media.www.ntdaily.com/media/storage/paper877/news/2007/02/07/Opinion/Hpv-Vaccine.Will.Not.Cause.Promiscuity.To.Rise-2702812.shtml?sourcedomain=www.ntdaily.com&MIIHost=media.collegepublisher.com

I think your post is such a display of misinformation and half backed facts, that deserves to be placed as an example of useless accusations.

Let me start by saying that I am no defender of big Pharma, and their marketing campaigns stink, much more when they are pushing useless drugs than in this particular case

Gardasil

Unfortunately, there appear to be some problems with this particular vaccine. It is approximately $330 a shot,

Wrong: Going price at MY local pharmacy, $120 a shot. Total cost: $360

Men and boys are also carriers for human papilloma virus (HPV) and men and boys are not being offered this vaccine.

If you bother to read the literature, there were plans to offer this vaccine to boys(there still are for the near future) , but they were scrapped because the un-altruistic nature of the "free-market" society: Men do get HPV related cancers: Penile Squamous cell carcinoma, Bowens' disease, Queyrat erythoplasia and in men that have sex with men, anal carcinoma. But the incidence of these conditions is so minuscule compared to cervical cancer, that it became tough to "sell a vaccine that would only directly benefit others". If I had a son, I would give it to him.

There have also been 386 reports of adverse affects from this vaccine, including seizures, autoimmune disorder responses, and some poor young girls have had to endure the eruption of cauliflower-like lesions on their inner thighs.

Every time you apply any treatment, including prayer treatment, if you do it to a large enough group, someone is going to die, or develop a complication within a few weeks of the treatment. Establishing the causal effect of side effects to treatment requires large, double blind placebo controlled studies.

Someone just die just after the moon eclipse took place: Is the Eclipse to blame? He was alive just until the eclipse happened! Yes, all medications have side effects, the worse of it is stirring the fear mongering from ignorant people with an agenda.

For illustration, think that still up to these days there are pending lawsuits from people that "suffered" a variety of conditions stemming from the massive campaign vaccination against the swine flu in 1975. Never mind that the vaccine given at that time was essentially the same people get every year before flu season. But once the hysteria takes, it snowballs.

Regarding the cauliflower-like lesions, please provide a report of this fact. I can provide you with 10 reports a day of similar lesions showing up in teen-ager boys and girls that DID NOT take the vaccine.

In addition, Merck, the manufacturer has received government immunity from prosecution should anyone be harmed in any way, including dying, from taking this vaccine. Many of the elected officials advocating for this vaccine have admitted to be being on Merck's payroll.

That is an unfortunate problem in ALL pharma industry, not only GARDASIL development. Under that line of logic, pretty much all recently developed drugs are suspect. And they are. It is up to you to take a nihilistic posture of denying there is any benefit in new drugs because the suspect environment in which they are developed, approved and marketed.

And yes, big Pharma puts as a pre-condition immunity from prosecution which is are pretty much standard in vaccine development after the Swine flu and the Pertussis "damage" fiascoes.

Noteworthy, vaccines are some of the drugs that make the least sense from the business point of view: When you develop a Cholesterol medication, you will have a captive population with a steady revenue of, let’s say 100 dollars a month, for years to come.

A vaccine, an effective vaccine consists of a few doses. No more revenue. and if the product indeed is effective, the market should shrink as time goes by. Economically unviable wouln't you say?

We do need effective vaccines against sexually transmitted diseases. But I think Gardasil was rolled out too early and its yet-to-be-completely-determined side effects are not well-understood by its manufacturer. My concern is women and young girls are being used as guinea pigs for what may be an unsafe product.

For your information we have had an effective vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease going on for 15 years now. Hepatitis B. It also prevents a fair amount of heaptocellular carcinoma. Your kids got it before going to school. It is mandatory, as mandatory can be enforced in this country.

It is not 100% effective, about 10% failure rate, but is better than nothing.

How come it slipped under the fanatics' radar? They did not know this, but HepB is very much an STD and transfusion related illness, actually has the same risk factors that HIV has: men that have sex with men used to have a prevalence of more than 50% in the 70's.

The benefits of HepB vaccine are not obvious yet, because HepB is a chronic, silent infection, but they will come.

The price of HepB vaccine? has come down somewhat, ~50 dollars per dose, three doses.

FJG